FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Fedora Commons: Sandy Payette
(607) 255-9222, payette@cs.cornell.edu
<http://www.fedora-commons.org>http://www.fedora-commons.org
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: Greg Nelson
(415) 561-7427, greg.nelson@moore.org
FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
FOR BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES
(Ithaca, New York, August, 2007) - Fedora Commons announced the award
of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore
Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks
necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars,
museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and
preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a
new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the
Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration
between Cornell University and the University of Virginia. The
Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object
Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell
Computing and Information Science.
With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to
support the development and deployment of open source software, which
facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly,
scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form. The
software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty
Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of
intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and
students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas,
and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues
worldwide. With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository
system, developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, the new software will continue to focus on the integrity
and longevity of the intellectual products that underlie this new
form of knowledge work. The result will be an open source software
platform that both enables collaborative models of information
creation and sharing, and provides sustainable repositories to secure
the digital materials that constitute our intellectual, scientific,
and cultural history.
Recognizing the importance of multiple participants in the
development of new technologies to support this vision, the Moore
Foundation funding will also support the growth and diversification
of the Fedora Community, a global set of partners who will cooperate
in software development, application deployment, and community
outreach for Fedora Commons. This network of partners will be
instrumental for making Fedora Commons a self-sustainable non-profit
organization that will support and incubate open-source software
projects that focus on new mechanisms for information formation,
access, collaboration, and preservation.
According to Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons,
"the new Fedora Commons can foster technologies and partnerships that
make it possible for academic and scientific communities to publish,
share, and archive the results of their own work in a free, open
fashion, and make it possible to analyze and use content in novel
ways."
"Establishing a sustainable open-source software system that provides
the basic infrastructure for on-line communities of scholars will
have enduring impact. The unanticipated cross-disciplinary uses of
this open platform are the hallmark of this revolutionary
infrastructure," said Jim Omura, technology strategist with the
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Payette also noted, "The open-source software that is developed and
distributed by Fedora Commons can impact the entire lifecycle of what
is often referred to as "e-Research" and "e-Science," including
storage of experimental data, analysis of experimental results, peer
review, publication of findings, and the reuse of published material
for the next generation of scholarly works. We will also continue
our work with libraries and museums to facilitate the sharing of
digitized collections, making previously locked away material
available to wide audiences. Also, building on our attention to
digital preservation in the Fedora open-source repository system,
Fedora Commons will continue to stress the importance of the
sustainability of digital information in applications of our work."
About Fedora Commons
<http://www.fedora-commons.org>Fedora Commons is a non-profit
organization whose purpose is to provide sustainable open-source
technologies to help individuals and organizations create, manage,
publish, share, and preserve digital content upon which we form our
intellectual, scientific, and cultural heritage. Since 2001, with
support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cornell University and
the University of Virginia have collaborated on the Fedora Project
which has developed, distributed, and supported innovative
open-source repository software that combines content management, web
services, and semantic technologies. The Fedora software has been
adopted worldwide to support an array of applications including
open-access publishing, scholarly communication, digital libraries,
e-science, archives, and education.
Fedora Commons will initially be located in the Information Science
Building at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. The Executive
Director of Fedora Commons is Sandy Payette, who co-invented the
Fedora architecture and led the Cornell arm of the open-source Fedora
Project. The Board of Directors of Fedora Commons provides
leadership from multiple communities, including open-access
publishing, digital libraries, sciences, and humanities. For more
information, visit http://www.fedora-commons.org.
About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in 2000, seeks to
advance environmental conservation and cutting-edge scientific
research around the world and improve the quality of life in the San
Francisco Bay Area. The Foundation's Science Program seeks to make a
significant impact on the development of provocative, transformative
scientific research, and increase knowledge in emerging fields. For
more information, visit http://www.moore.org.
--
Carol Minton Morris
Communications Director
National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
http://NSDL.org
Communications and Media Director
Fedora Commons
http://www.fedora-commons.org
Cornell Information Science
301 College Ave.
Ithaca, NY 14850
607 255-2702
clt6@cornell.edu